CB
85 Autumn
Track One: Signature
tune: Nielsen: The Mist Is Lifting
Hullo, this is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike
Burrows. You have just heard the Danish
Composer, Carl Nielsen’s short piece, scored for flute and harp, The Mist Is
Lifting, from his incidental music to The Mother. Autumn and remembrance in music are the
theme of this programme, and this wistful little piece appears to distil both
remembrance, farawayness and fresh air in which remembrance seems most
poignant. To me, it is an honorary Song
of Autumn.
For us, inescapably, Autumn is a time to remember; not only
because of the dead of the world’s never-ending wars, but because after
harvest-time, we know what earth has contributed: decay settles over where our cereal, fruit and vegetable-crops,
forage for life-stock and manure for fertiliser were gained: all around us, its reeks add to mists and
valley-covering morning fogs, and the smoke of bonfires, though wayside fruits
glisten brightly or are scattered about nut-trees.
Nature itself prepares for hard times about us; in reeling down
leaves, its wildlife prepares for privation or hibernation where emigration has
begun, on the land we have parcelled out, and on the unused land between
boundaries. Already, we prepare for next
year’s yields. If there are expectations
of John Barleycorn’s and the orchards’ cheer, the farm-crops are vital as food;
dairy-products and meat come of the soil, too.
We have much for which to be thankful.
A time of cool winds, grey skies and undispersing wood-smoke, or
of brisk, crisp, frosty air and royal colours; in all weathers, Autumn is a
time of spooks, and not only of spooks in khaki. The countryside and everything and everyone in
it are instinct with all who ever lived and died here. Those wayside
fruits? Sloes, blackberries, crab-apples
and elder-berries and beech- and hazel-nuts used to be poor man’s treats or the
perquisites of WI Hedgerow Industries, Limited.
In the home of a jam-,pickle- or wine-maker - there is a conserve or
cordial glow to this time of laying in home-made food.
Gathering fruit in a wet, windy wooded lane or Crickley quarry
has a peculiar Autumnal brilliancy about it.
Afterwards. Autumn is generally
regarded as a wild season for weather, the baring or evergreen trees still or tossed
passively by a collision between temperatures and as if by the restlessness of
conscious life.
Hallowe’en, All Saints, All-Souls, Bonfire Night, are a
progression that is ticked off by those who await Advent and Christmas, not all of whom are children.
Elgar’s Piano Quintet is a late work, one of three chamber
pieces begun towards the close of the Great War.
Having retreated from the world, he was living with his wife in a
small cottage, Brinkwells, in Sussex, not far from Petworth. It was a time for the burning of the leaves
for him: he spent hours wandering in the
woods, learning carpentry and making bonfires, and improvizing and composing
the only chamber music that he would publish, a Violin Sonata, a String Quartet
and Piano Quintet, and, at the same time, his Cello Concerto: over all these works there is a deepening
sense of unease, sadness and sensations too vivid to be borne. The spirit of Beethoven’s Late Quartets, and
the chamber-music of Schumann and Brahms. His Wife, to whom he was devoted, was
beginning to ail; he felt that he no longer shared his work with an interested
public, and he looked to the future without any of the hopes of peace that many
were beginning to feel. In the slow
movement, the great Adagio, of the Piano Quintet, he found a reply to despair. It seems steeped in the season. In inspired
apparent improvization amid controlled organic development; the piano decorates
certainty and haunting moments in the strings, underlines or swells the melodic
matter with rich expressiveness.
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. Today’s
programme is based round music and poetry of Autumn and Remembrance.
Autumn Scene, by Jack Brown,
captures something of the air of Autumn, to me.
Perhaps it is that it is music that was closer to the culture of my childhood than
the Eighties would be to kids of today. Really,
it is made by the simple arpeggios in woodwind from the opening and held notes
in the strings, followed by the simple chords held against arpeggios, which
form languorous harmonic sequences similar to those found in a composer like
Delius, the flute-capped instrumentation providing what contrasts there are,
the violins given the affecting moments; it reminds me of boating on the Avon
in Bath, the slow onward movement on the currents revealing now and then some
new deep tint and shade in the cold water and the trees’ overarching traceries
of turning and falling leaves and ripened fruit. Autumn is a time for leisure, one may think,
watching the unrowed progress of a fallen leaf.
Track Two: Jack Brown, Autumn
Scene
Now, one of Tchaikovsky’s Twelve ‘Seasons’, a group of
piano-pieces written to a commission from the St Petersburg journal Nuvellist,
for publication month by month in the journal’s pages. To each of the pieces he
gave an epigraph, that for the eighth being from Tolstoy: “The fall, falling on our poor orchard,
the yellow leaves flying in the wind.”
Its pensiveness is the stillness of contemplation - the orchard is
seen from the window. Always intensely
gregarious or as intensely misanthropic - as he himself put it - Tchaikovsky
loved to escape Moscow to live the dacha-country-life while working, but
isolation, the low chances of visitors who were pleasant company, perhaps, lend
this music the truth of a well-understood loneliness. The style of interplay between right and left
hand, canons, imitations and appogiatura, cause it to be akin to the outer sections of a
Chopin Nocturne. Its mood remains not so
much lighter as less untreatable with life. There is no middle section in terms of fresh contrast,
but the long melody gives the illusion of it before a second statement and
dying fall.
Track Three: October -
Autumn Song, Number 10 0f Tchaikovsky’s Seasons.
A work for male voices, brass and percussion, Gustav Holst’s setting
of the American poet Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem was written in 1914. Holst, a lifelong socialist and pacifist, had
none of the pro-War hysteria of the British Establishment and people. Swedish by descent, and born and brought up
in Cheltenham, his family name was von Holst; he was belatedly forced to
drop the ‘von’!
In this work, he foresaw the breaking of hearts by the
unremitting energy and stoicism that a long industrial War demands of the
humans who work machines of death and destruction. A slow march, Dirge prefigures the
music of Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age, and seems as if shattered by
the turmoil and brutal cruelty of Mars, The Bringer of War. Beginning with voices only, trumpets
hector, trombones - Holst’s own instrument - plod on more or less in harmony,
hushed or loud as the text is followed; at times, the trombones are uppermost
in dynamics, at others, just there in dryness, until silenced for a few bars shortly
before the close as deepest feeling is disclosed; when they pick up again, as
if the procession had been halted for a second by some casual, unforeseen
obstacle, it is to die away quickly in the distance. It is a ghastly vision of a march such as fresh
formations saw on roads behind the reserve trenches as old hands on rest came
away. Holst was forty at the
outbreak of War, and was old enough to see no armed service - though his friend
Vaughan Williams, two years older, served as an ambulance-man, then an artillery
officer. Eventually he found himself far
from home organizing YM CA concerts for the troops in Salonika. The poem instances the funeral of two
soldiers, a father and son killed in the same attack; the poet watches the passing
of the procession to the new-made grave; the sabbath sun completed, the moon
rises. The dead veterans have the
dignified circumstance of their military funeral and the moon, the poet, the
sight and sound of it all, and their heroism.
It should be noted that the moon is traditionally a symbol of madness and
object of hopeless wishes. The father
and son killed together is proof of faith and national unity, or a prodigy
affording the nation a symbol of national disaster. Is there a future where father and son die
side-by-side in the same slaughter? Is
it only defiance of humanity’s self-generated fate?
Track Four: Holst: A Dirge For Two Veterans
The Gloustershire poet-composer, Ivor Gurney, Ivor Beegy as he
called himself to close friends, should be remembered. He returned from the Great War on a
half-pension because though disturbed and suffering from possible shellshock in
addition to the effects of gassing, he had had a spell of neurasthenia whilst a
student, before serving for a year on the Western Front. That they had taken him on as a Private in
spite of this and that he had exhibited no signs of strain on active service
could be of no account. That he survived
service may have been down to having a sympathetic officer: in one of his many poems about his War, he
described how after seeing a favourite NCO mown down on a night-attack, he refused an order to advance under fire:
“But I weak,
hungry, and willing
only for the chance
Of line - to
fight in the line, only for the chance
laydown under unbroken
Wires, and saw the flashes
and kept unshaken,
Till the politest voice, a finicking
accent, said,
"Do you think you could crawl
through there: there’s a hole.”
Darkness shot-at: I smiled, as
politely replied,
"I’m afraid not, sir.” There was no
hole no way to be seen
Nothing but chance of death,
after tearing of clothes.”
His skin was more important to him than his uniform, but his uniform
was up there, very likely with tea and tobacco.
His life after service was erratic but productive of poetry and
music that took until long after his death in an asylum to collate, edit and
publish. Most of his music remains
unpublished and unplayed. For now, his
songs are his chief glory.
October the Twenty-first is the anniversary of Nelson’s victory
at Trafalgar, another Autumn celebration. Gurney’s The Night of Trafalgar
is a pre-War ballad, a setting of a poem from Hardy’s Dynasts.
Gurney longed for popularity in a time when good and sometimes
bad Art-songs sold well to amateurs as well as professionals in this country. Of course, it was not to be, though this
strophic song has enough echoes of Stanford’s Drake’s Drum, amid its
general Gurneyesque of melodic and harmonic vagaries, to seem a good try. Inspired by Stanford? A man who had grown up in Gloucester of the
Eighteen Nineties and turn of the last century felt that he had the sea in his
blood, and as a youngster, Gurney had turned up at the RCM in his blue reefer
jacket and often wished to go to sea.
Track Five: Gurney: The Night of Trafalgar
November The Fifth, Firework Night, Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes
Night to those who think it a good old traditional British custom to celebrate
a King’s survival by burning a Catholic who has already been hanged, drawn and
quartered - perhaps it is.In this country, Handel’s Music For The Royal
Fireworks has always been popular, witness the large range of long-playing
records once issued with the Water Music on one side and Fireworks
Music on the other. A very
responsible custom that; so long as Side B remained dry, we could have
fun. It was all rather like British
fireworks on a British November evening, in fact.The Music for The Royal
Fireworks was written for our second Hanoverian Monarch, George The Second,
a military man, he had very little time for music or professional
musicians. Reputedly, he disliked
violins and stringed instruments as a race.
For him, brass, woodwind and percussion were music. The Royal
Fireworks takes the form of a French Suite scored for a band that was found acceptable to His Majesty, heavy on brass and
percussion, light on the strings.
Here is the brisk and brassy La Rejouissance.
Track Six: Handel: Music For The Royal Fireworks
Gerald Finzi (1901-56) was a minor composer who never wrote a
less than considered or less than considerable note.
His music came from deep within him, and projects might take him
years of quietness puntuated by flashes of inspiration to complete. This does not explain why he was known as
Frenzy to his friends. He was
perennially aware of lost time, his childhood and early youth having been
punctuated by family tragedies and the Great War, in which his most admired
teacher, Ernest Farrar, was killed and the artist whom he later idolized, Ivor
Gurney, was maimed. in mind.
Finzi waited as his songs ripened: the piano-part was secondary,
the scansion of the poem that he set most important; words were set syllable by
syllable with at all times a natural stress, the tune arising having to be
grateful to sing.
That he could do this to Hardy’s at the same time dense and
loose-woven poetry is a wonder in itself.
As it was, the concrete details and crack-jaw abstractedness in this
verse, not to mention the thorough use of dislocated rhythm or enjambment never
defeated him. What results isn’t modern,
but it is new when you first hear it, and each time you listen, you find it
remains, if not new, then still beautiful - and pure Hardy and Finzi.
From the Hardy Cycle, A Young Man’s Exhortation, a cycle
that follows an idealist from youth to his lying peacefully in the grave under the
yellowing trees, here is the sixth of ten songs, Shortening Days. The first fire since the Summer is
lighted.
Track Seven: Finzi, From
A Young Man’s Exhortation, Shortening
Days
The air of the English Autumn is nowhere better described in
music than in Finzi’s orchestral piece, The Fall of The Leaf, the full-score
of which was left incomplete at his
death, having been begun decades earlier.
Recast more than once, it had been envisaged as a movement in a
Symphony. It is of that order but in some way programmatic in sound: from the tremulous opening, in which flute -
hollowly cold - and oboe warm as if more from the heart, it seems that The
Fall of The Leaf is a fine title.
The brassy climaxes, of which there are two, with surging strings are of
life or the chill wind in which man’s mortality is felt so keenly and so often
in the course of one’s years. The
scoring is magnificent in its use of the tone-colours of flute and oboe in
particular, consolatory, together, almost speaking as well as singing; the
hesitant strings are yet passionate - the violins given brief chances for
lyricism; in certain hollowed-out moments – heavy pizzicati in the lower
strings, brief figures in high and then low woodwind and swelling, warning
sounds from the horns, out of which comes violin-protest that is dashed by momentary
metal percussion and downward scales, there are hints of the style of another composer,
Sir Arthur Bliss, who was a friend and Finzi’s opposite in general temperament
and personal confidence, an out-going, much-commissioned composer of large-scale
works.
There is much use of brittle, clashing harmony, grinding
appogiaturas as well as tiny motifs like birdcalls and with little
support. The dissonance of the two
climaxes is mastered by unisons as inflexible as the discords under them, and
if the underlying song shape is regathered after the first, after the second,
flute and oboe are reunited in a new theme and orchestral dying fall - the music
of the very opening returning on low woodwind, clarinet and bassoon.
Let’s end with Finzi’s Orchestral Elegy, The Fall of
The Leaf.
This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. I hope you enjoyed this programme and I’ll have your company
again, soon.
Track Eight: Finzi: The
Fall of The Leaf, Elegy for Orchestra
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